The Radio Taught Me to Dream
Every night at nine, a voice from far away widened my ceiling.
The most important piece of furniture in my childhood was a two band Philips radio with a cracked dial and a wire hanger where the antenna used to be. It sat on the kitchen shelf next to the Dalda tin, and every night at nine o'clock it did something no object in our town could do: it left.
We lived in a small town that the trains only slowed down for. Two cinemas, one bridge, a bus stand that flooded every monsoon on schedule. The town's whole sky fit between the water tank and the temple gopuram. And then at nine, my father would twist the cracked dial through a blizzard of static, past Morse hiss and a preacher and something in a language none of us knew, until a voice surfaced, warm and unhurried, saying good evening to nobody in particular and everybody at once.
The show had a name, but in our house it was just Nine O'Clock. The announcer never told us his own name, only his sign off: 'Sleep well, wherever this finds you.'
Wherever this finds you... I was nine years old, lying on a mat because summer made the beds unbearable, and that phrase did something permanent to me. It meant the voice did not know where I was. It meant I could be anywhere. It meant, if you followed the logic all the way, that anywhere existed.
Power cuts made it better, not worse. The radio ran on fat red Eveready batteries, so when the town went dark the voice kept going, and my mother would light a single candle on the shelf beside it. I have seen cathedrals since. I am telling you, nothing has ever looked more like the inside of a holy place than that radio in candlelight with the whole family arranged around it on the floor.
The voice played requests. That was the miracle at the center of it. Ordinary people wrote postcards, and the voice read their names into the air: a jawan posted somewhere cold, a newly married girl missing her mother, a lorry driver's children in a town even smaller than ours. Then it played their song. I used to lie there doing the math of it: a postcard costs fifteen paise, the radio reaches everywhere, therefore for fifteen paise anyone, even me, could exist out loud in a thousand houses at once.
The year I turned eleven, I tested the theorem. My mother's birthday fell in October. I bought a postcard with saved tiffin money and drafted the request four times on rough paper before committing ink. I asked for her favorite song, the one she hummed while rolling chapatis, and I signed it with my full name, school, class and section, because at eleven you assume the universe files things properly.
Then I waited.
October came. Every night at nine I sat closer to the radio than necessary, stomach tight through the whole hour... and every night the voice read out other people's names and I hated the jawan and the lorry driver with all the pure, concentrated unfairness an eleven year old can produce.
Her birthday passed. November passed.
I stopped mentioning it, which in a child is the loudest form of grief.
And then on a cold ordinary Tuesday in December, between two songs, the voice said my name.
It said my name, my school, my class and section.
It said, 'This one is late, and I am sorry, because some letters take the long way. He wants his mother to know.' And then the song came on, the chapati song, filling the kitchen where the actual woman stood with flour on her hands, frozen, staring at the radio like it had grown a face. My father stopped mid sentence. My mother sat down on the floor where she was standing and cried into her flour covered hands while the whole invisible country listened to her song with her.
I have won a few things since.
Nothing has ever felt like that.
After that night my ceiling was never just a ceiling. The voice had proof of me now. I started narrating things quietly under my breath, cricket matches, the walk to school, describing our town to an imaginary listener in a place with snow. I did not know the word for what I was practicing. I only knew the radio had shown me the trick behind every dream I have ever had since: somewhere out there is a stranger who might be listening, so speak as if they are.
The man behind the dial
Here is the part I did not learn until I was thirty four.
By then I was living in a city, doing a job with a lanyard, and an assignment sent me to the regional broadcasting station, a yellow building with disappointed corridors and ceiling fans from another government. And in a back studio, semi retired, doing the graveyard continuity shift, was the voice.
I knew it before I saw him... He was small, which shocked me, an old man in a sweater vest with spectacles on a chain, drinking tea from a steel tumbler in a booth with foam peeling off the walls. When he spoke into the microphone the whole warm country of my childhood came out of this frail chest, and when he stopped he was just a man again, coughing softly.
I told him about the postcard. I gave him the town, the year, the chapati song, my mother on the flour dusted floor. I expected polite blankness... Instead he took off his spectacles and was quiet for a moment.
'The ones from the small towns,' he said, 'I read every single one. Even the late ones. Especially the late ones.' He turned the steel tumbler in his hands. 'You people thought I was your window. Sit in that booth for thirty years, son, talking into a black wall, no applause, no faces, and then tell me who was the window for whom. Those postcards were the only proof I had that the dark was full of people.'
We thought his voice was our window to the world. It turned out our postcards were his.
All those nights I had imagined him as a man standing somewhere high and bright, scattering names downward like coins. He had been sitting in a padded room talking to a wall, dreaming us as hard as we were dreaming him.
The whole thing was two lonelinesses meeting at the exact frequency of nine o'clock.
I went home and dug out everything I had ever scribbled and never shown anyone. Because of him I already believed the central improbable thing: that a stranger might genuinely be listening. So I sent a poem to a monthly poetry contest the way an eleven year old once sent a postcard, too late, badly addressed, incandescent with hope. It did not win... The second one did not win either.
The fifth one was read at a small online event by a woman I have never met, who said my name, my full name, into a microphone, and I sat in front of my laptop at nine o'clock at night feeling the old tightness in my stomach, eleven again.
I write about that radio often now. Most of what I put into poems about memory is really about that kitchen shelf, and most of what I write about hope is fifteen paise of it, traveling the long way.
The Philips died sometime in the nineties and my mother, who throws nothing away, kept it. It sits in her kitchen still, dial cracked, hanger antenna bent into a question mark. Last Diwali the power went out, right on schedule, and she lit a candle and set it beside the dead radio out of pure muscle memory. I sat on the floor and looked at the two of them glowing there, and my ceiling, forty years wide now, kept right on widening.
Sleep well, wherever this finds you.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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